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Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

clivethompson.medium.com

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Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#61

Post by jcims »

paulpauper wrote: post #34
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #19

I wish my life was so utterly without other problems that I could get this worked up about something so minor and meaningless.

yet it went viral, so apparently a lot of ppl find it interesting, and the traffic probably is an incentive for him to keep writing similar articles about seemingly mundane things. There is a huge online audience for mundane observations, as opposed to the always-on news cycle.

Probably for the same reasons that one of the predominant tones on Twitter is howling despair about, in the larger view, trifling things

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#62

Post by dylan604 »

ljm wrote: post #54

> Looking at these leaden vistas of America This touches on something else: are all the Google captchas, worldwide, based on photos taken within the US? I suspect they are, and cultural imperialism is at play: taxis in New York are yellow, therefore a yellow car must be a taxi. That kind of thing.

Or a 'vette. Can't forget the canary yellow corvettes.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#63

Post by lgeorget »

mixedCase wrote: post #59

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…

I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#64

Post by andrepd »

dylan604 wrote: post #58
mediocregopher wrote: post #7

For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

I hate captchas with a passion, yet I was recently forced to deploy it on website due to direct instructions from the credit card processor. The system was being used to roll through credit cards script-o-matically, and they mandated captchas to be deployed on threat of closing our account if not. So if anyone has better solution so I can eliminate the G and is Wordpress happy, I'm all ears (or eyes reading in this c…

There are captcha providers besides google, such as hcaptcha, or even rolling your own solution (a la old vbulletin forums)

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#65

Post by jodrellblank »

mediocregopher wrote: post #7

For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

Something melancholy about them is the loss of the idealism of "User Agent" as a scriptable machine which can act on your behalf on the innocent and collaborative proto-internet.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#66

Post by mrkramer »

dunnevens wrote: post #52
Zababa wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.

Sometimes I end up failing them deliberately. I can't boycott them because they're often in the way of important sites. So my small, practically invisible protest is to never click more than 3 times. If you want me to pick out all the bicycles, you better have 3 or less. I'm only clicking 3. I fully understand this isn't going to have any effect. Maybe if a million of us were doing it, it would. But it still makes me…

So you want us to DDoS the captcha networks? Hmm is that even legal? But it would be somewhat cool if millions of people starting failing captcha on purpose it would be something like decentralized volunteer mass ddos attack.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#67

Post by matheusmoreira »

mediocregopher wrote: post #7

For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

There's also the indignity of doing unpaid work for Google. We're not their fucking slaves.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#68

Post by LandR »

mrkramer wrote: post #47

As far as I understood the problem with Captcha was and is that it is too American not in a bad sense but culturally. People coming and using the Internet from developing countries might not be able to solve Captcha because their culture is different. I was thinking how to solve this problem and I came to the conclusion that it is very hard to design puzzle for every country in the world so I decided to put them in c…

> My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human.

This seems even worse to me. Wave at the camera to prove you are human... This is a whole other level of creepy above depressing captchas. I would not do this, ever.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#69

Post by dylan604 »

andrepd wrote: post #64
dylan604 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate captchas with a passion, yet I was recently forced to deploy it on website due to direct instructions from the credit card processor. The system was being used to roll through credit cards script-o-matically, and they mandated captchas to be deployed on threat of closing our account if not. So if anyone has better solution so I can eliminate the G and is Wordpress happy, I'm all ears (or eyes reading in this c…

There are captcha providers besides google, such as hcaptcha, or even rolling your own solution (a la old vbulletin forums)

sorry. meant better than captcha like solutions. i know there are others, but it's still click here until we believe you're not a bot.

Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

#70

Post by [deleted] »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #22
nullc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a thing. Turn up privacy features in your browser (including the undocumented ones you need to go to about:config to adjust) and stay logged out of google and you'll get them. Or just fire off a lot of searches pretty fast e.g. by launching a bunch of tabs to search for variations of a term.

If privacy was that important to me, I'd be using DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

[deleted]
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